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In Search of Urban Vitalis

Roskilde University

The notion of urban vitalis as constitutive to urbanity and urbanism has not been acknowledged thus far as perhaps a premise to urban politics and planning. Critical urban studies instead see planning as a matter of designing the everydayness of everyday life by spatializing its flows and encounters. This article focuses on a force of urbanity and urbanism that at least Georg Simmel diagnosed and discusses the missing urban vitalis in urban planning and how policy makers in fact rely very much on vitalism as an a priori force to urbanism. The aim of the Danish urban regeneration project kvarterløft (neighborhood regeneration) is, politically speaking, to reconstruct bonding, inclusive, caring urban communities, and the project therefore very much relies on local interactionism and connectivity. The article discusses how this project, however, exemplifies more generally a political reliance on the existence of an urban vitalis.

Key Words: vitalism • Deleuze • the urban • Simmel • urban planning

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